In the paper by Katscher, U. et al., “Determination of Electric Conductivity and Local SAR Via B1 Mapping” (IEEE Trans. Med. Imag. 2009; 28:1365-1374), it has been suggested to derive electric conductivity of portions of a subject of interest from spatial sensitivity distributions of applied radio frequency coils of a magnetic resonance imaging system by an Electric Properties Tomography (EPT) approach. The electric properties of the portions of the subject of interest can potentially be used as additional information for supporting diagnostics with the object to discriminate healthy tissue from malign tissue, e.g. a tumor.
The paper by Voigt, T. et al., “Quantitative Conductivity and Permittivity Imaging of the Human Brain Using Electric Properties Tomography” (Magn. Reson. in Med. 2011; 66:456-466) describes a method and formula for reconstructing spatial electric conductivity distributions of portions of a subject of interest from phase images of the radio frequency transmit field employed in magnetic resonance imaging.
Katscher et al., Proc ISMRM 2012, p. 3482 describes an EPT reconstruction algorithm, based on fitting local parabolic functions on the Tx phase. The publication describes that parabola fitting can be used to remove boundary artefacts.
It is desirable to provide a fast and robust method for reconstructing a spatial distribution of electric conductivity of a portion of a subject of interest from magnetic resonance image data.